GiveWell’s research aims to help donors by recommending charities we believe can put donations to use efficiently to save or improve lives. Our research focuses on maximizing the good donors can accomplish with their gifts by identifying where to donate effectively.
This is the first of two posts discussing another important aspect of giving effectively: how you donate. The second post will discuss how to maximize your gift (via tax deductions, employer matches, and other strategies) and to ensure the greatest percentage of your donation reaches the charity, rather than being taken up by fees. This post will discuss how to reduce the administrative burdens on charities by choosing your donation method wisely.

If you’re thinking about where to give to charity this year and it would be helpful to speak with a member of GiveWell's staff about your decision, please let us know. We're happy to answer questions sent to info@givewell.org or to schedule a call via the form .

This year, we added two new top charities, Evidence Action's No Lean Season program and Helen Keller International's vitamin A supplementation program, and retained our seven top charities from 2016. We also added Evidence Action's Dispensers for Safe Water program to our list of standout charities.
We recommend that donors give to GiveWell for granting to top charities at our so that we can direct the funding to the top charity or charities with the most pressing funding need. For donors who prefer to give directly to our top charities, we recommend giving 70 percent of your donation to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) and 30 percent to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) to maximize your impact. We expect , a foundation with which we work closely, to provide significant support to each top charity; our recommendation to give to AMF and SCI is based on how much good we believe additional donations can do.

This fall, renowned soprano Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick will inhale deeply, filling her new transplanted lungs with air, and sing. Performing alongside her will be Esperanza Tufani, a 24-year-old restaurant manager in Ohio. Tufani's mother was the donor for Tillemann-Dick's lungs.

Many donors who give through GiveWell's website choose to to support "Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell's ," rather than selecting a specific recommended charity or charities as the target of their gift.
We periodically grant these "discretionary funds" to what we see as the highest-value funding opportunities among our . We last granted discretionary funds in ; then, we granted $4.4 million to the Against Malaria Foundation and $0.5 million to the Deworm the World Initiative.
Since we last allocated funds, we received an additional $1.25 million in discretionary funds that we recently granted out. We also hold roughly $1 million in discretionary funds that we plan to grant out in the next month or two. We plan to grant all of this funding to the .
Recommendation for donors
We continue to that donors give 100% of their donation to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). In other words, although we're choosing to grant discretionary funds to Deworm the World, we don't believe that donors who rely on our recommendations should adjust their giving at this time. We explain the rationale for this below.

One of our is "intervention prioritization," our work to assess a large number of programs (interventions) as potential GiveWell we'd be interested in recommending charities working on.
Summary
This post will provide a brief overview of our intervention work this year, focusing on the we've published in 2017.
Programs we plan to continue investigating:

We've interested in fistula surgery as a potential GiveWell priority program. However, as with other surgery charities, we have struggled to identify an organization that meets GiveWell's . Now, we're and are excited that we may be able to consider a fistula surgery organization as a potential GiveWell top charity.
Our longstanding interest in interventions to treat fistula can be attributed in part to the popular narrative presented about fistula--the condition, which is often associated with social ostracization--appears to cause a significant amount of suffering, and seems to be treatable. We're not sure how representative the popular narrative is, but as donors, it has contributed to our continued interest in better understanding this intervention, along with the feeling that surgery charities in general may offer low-cost, life-changing impacts.
Summary
This post will discuss:

Fistula management, including surgery, as an intervention.

Our open questions and uncertainty around fistula management programs, particularly their costs.

Our plans to to help answer some of our questions about fistula management.